Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • SEO Q&A
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • Case Studies
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      What is your Brand Authority?
      Moz

      What is your Brand Authority?

      Check yours now
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • SEO Q&A

        Insights & discussions from an SEO community of 500,000+.

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • Case Studies

        Explore how Moz drives ROI with a proven track record of success.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. ECommerce: Best Practice for expired product pages

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    ECommerce: Best Practice for expired product pages

    Technical SEO
    4
    9
    3102
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • zeepartner
      zeepartner last edited by

      I'm optimizing a pet supplies site (http://www.qualipet.ch/) and have a question about the best practice for expired product pages.

      We have thousands of products and hundreds of our offers just exist for a few months. Currently, when a product is no longer available, the site just returns a 404. Now I'm wondering what a better solution could be:

      1. When a product disappears, a 301 redirect is established to the category page it in (i.e. leash would redirect to dog accessories).

      2. After a product disappers, a customized 404 page appears, listing similar products (but the server returns a 404)

      I prefer solution 1, but am afraid that having hundreds of new redirects each month might look strange. But then again, returning lots of 404s to search engines is also not the best option.

      Do you know the best practice for large ecommerce sites where they have hundreds or even thousands of products that appear/disappear on a frequent basis? What should be done with those obsolete URLs?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • KevinBudzynski
        KevinBudzynski @zeepartner last edited by

        Unfortunately manually.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Matthew_Edgar
          Matthew_Edgar @zeepartner last edited by

          Yep, on two different sites we did thousands of redirects at a time with no issues. In one case it was annual and the other it was quarterly but I don't see any reason monthly would be any different.

          Definitely post your findings after implementation or maybe even write a YouMoz post about what you find out!

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • Igal_Zeifman
            Igal_Zeifman @zeepartner last edited by

            Good luck 🙂

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • zeepartner
              zeepartner last edited by

              Thanks for your thoughts guys.

              @Igal@Incapsula: I like your 302 idea! That might acutally make a lot of sense for some products that are short-lived.

              @Matthew: Good to know that lots of 301s were not an issue on your sites. Are you talking about thousands of those, though?

              Most importantly, I will have to find something that can be automated and doesn't require much extra-work. I will probably go for 301s and remove those after a few months

              Remind me to post my learnings here after implementation:)

              Igal_Zeifman Matthew_Edgar 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • Igal_Zeifman
                Igal_Zeifman last edited by

                (+1)  For redirect to main category page option. I did this several time, including for a very large tourism site which had a LOT of "inventory" changes (we are talking about dozens-hundreds/day) and had great results.

                One thing I would like to suggest is to look into doing 302 and removing the redirects after 2-3 month.

                The reason for this is purely practical. In our case, after just a few month, we were looking at many thousands of redirects and this is not something you want to "carry around".
                My suggestion allows you to still make use of link juice for removed pages and, at the same time, have a manageable redirect profile.

                As a safe net you can have a generic: "404 >>> 301 >>> Homepage" rule underneath.

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • Matthew_Edgar
                  Matthew_Edgar last edited by

                  Hey,

                  In general, I would opt for option 1 as that would be the most scale-able solution. Whenever I've done this, I've not seen any issues with having lots of 301s appear. Given the shorter life span of those product pages you probably won't have lots of links going to those pages (or social, etc.) and I think that helps explain why I've not seen issues redirecting this many pages.

                  That being said, if you do have lots of links or social signals referencing a certain product page, that is when I'd opt for the custom page listing similar products. I've had success doing this for high-traffic product pages that have been removed as it can help maintain the sale.  In terms of the signal, it really depends. If you are still offering unique content relevant to search queries and links referencing that page, I'd deliver a status 200 (it is still a good page worthy of attention). If the content isn't all that unique, and it is more for people (to maintain the sale) as opposed to search, I would have that page deliver a status 410 (saying it is gone).

                  I hope that helps!

                  Matthew

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • zeepartner
                    zeepartner @KevinBudzynski last edited by

                    thanks Kevin, so you're also going with option 1.

                    Do you make those redirects manually, or does it run automated?

                    I should add that it's a Magento Webshop and we definitely need some automation since I am talking about hundreds of product pages.

                    KevinBudzynski 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • KevinBudzynski
                      KevinBudzynski last edited by

                      We have a customize search page for each category. When a product has been discontinued, we do a 301 redirect those pages to the category search page.

                      We use to do a 301 redirect of list similar products (by doing a search and capturing the url with the search term), but it proved to be to time-consuming as these products did not traditionally sold that well and did not bring in much traffic.

                      Not saying it's the best way, but this is what we do.

                      zeepartner 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • 1 / 1
                      • First post
                        Last post

                      Got a burning SEO question?

                      Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                      Start my free trial


                      Browse Questions

                      Explore more categories

                      • Moz Tools

                        Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

                      • SEO Tactics

                        Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

                      • Community

                        Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

                      • Digital Marketing

                        Chat about tactics outside of SEO

                      • Research & Trends

                        Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

                      • Support

                        Connect on product support and feature requests.

                      • See all categories

                      Related Questions

                      • Breemcc

                        Our clients Magento 2 site has lots of obsolete categories. Advice on SEO best practice for setting server level redirects so I can delete them?

                        magento nginx

                        Our client's Magento website has been running for at least a decade, so has a lot of old legacy categories for Brands they no longer carry. We're looking to trim down the amount of unnecessary URL Redirects in Magento, so my question is: Is there a way that is SEO efficient to setup permanent redirects at a server level (nginx) that Google will crawl to allow us at some point to delete the categories and Magento URL Redirects? If this is a good practice can you at some point then delete the server redirects as google has marked them as permanent?

                        Technical SEO | | Breemcc
                        0
                      • woshea

                        Google Search Console Showing 404 errors for product pages not in sitemap?

                        search console 404 error 404s

                        We have some products with url changes over the past several months. Google is showing these as having 404 errors even though they are not in sitemap (sitemap shows the correct NEW url). Is this expected? Will these errors eventually go away/stop being monitored by Google?

                        Technical SEO | | woshea
                        0
                      • znotes

                        What's the best way to test Angular JS heavy page for SEO?

                        Hi Moz community, Our tech team has recently decided to try switching our product pages to be JavaScript dependent, this includes links, product descriptions and things like breadcrumbs in JS. Given my concerns, they will create a proof of concept with a few product pages in a QA environment so I can test the SEO implications of these changes. They are planning to use Angular 5 client side rendering without any prerendering. I suggested universal but they said the lift was too great, so we're testing to see if this works. I've read a lot of the articles in this guide to all things SEO and JS and am fairly confident in understanding when a site uses JS and how to troubleshoot to make sure everything is getting crawled and indexed. https://sitebulb.com/resources/guides/javascript-seo-resources/ However, I am not sure I'll be able to test the QA pages since they aren't indexable and lives behind a login. I will be able to crawl the page using Screaming Frog but that's generally regarded as what a crawler should be able to crawl and not really what Googlebot will actually be able to crawl and index. Any thoughts on this, is this concern valid? Thanks!

                        Technical SEO | | znotes
                        0
                      • dkellyagile

                        Topic Cluster: URL Best Practices

                        I'm trying to be mature and employ the Topic Cluster strategy to my content. In doing so I realized there are a few URL options. Some more difficult to execute than others. -Is it important to call out the Pillar Topic in your subtopic URL?
                        -Does the Pillar Topic need to have its own landing page? (As opposed to just being part of the blog.) Here's an Example: My Pillar is: Inbound vs. Outbound
                        My subtopic is: Marketing Platforms Here are the URL options I can think of... Option 1: https://pipelineinbound.com/blog/inbound-vs-outbound-marketing-platforms/ Option 2: https://pipelineinbound.com/blog/which-marketing-platforms/ Option 3: https://pipelineinbound.com/blog/marketing-platforms-inbound-vs-outbound/ Option 4 (Hardest): https://pipelineinbound.com/inbound-vs-outbound/marketing-platforms/ Are there some fundamental best practices for URL structure and Link Building as it pertains to Topic Clusters? Thanks!

                        Technical SEO | | dkellyagile
                        0
                      • amastone

                        Canonical tag use for ecommerce product page detail

                        Hi, I have a category page I want to rank. This page has 24 different products quite similar but not exactly the same.
                        I want to use canonical tag in any product to the parent category. 
                        Is this a right use of the canonical? 
                        Category page I'm talking about is : Finger bits If I understand how to use canonical tags I can improve all my category pages. thanks marco

                        Technical SEO | | amastone
                        0
                      • Natitude

                        Best Practice on 301 Redirect - Images

                        We have two sites that sell the same products. We have decided to retire one of the sites as we'd like to focus on one property. I know best practice is to redirect apples to apples, which in our case is easily done since the sites sold the same thing. www.SiteABC.com/ProductA can be redirected to www.SiteXYZ.com/ProductA. My question is how far does that thinking go regarding images? Each product has a main product page, of course, and then up to 6 images in some cases. Is it necessary to redirect www.SiteABC.com/ProductA-Image1.jpg to www.SiteXYZ.com/ProductA-Image1.jpg? Or can they all be redirected to just the product page?

                        Technical SEO | | Natitude
                        0
                      • Charlessipe

                        Is the Authority of Individual Pages Diluted When You Add New Pages?

                        I was wondering if the authority of individual pages is diluted when you add new pages (in Google's view). Suppose your site had 100 pages and you added 100 new pages (without getting any new links). Would the average authority of the original pages significantly decrease and result in a drop in search traffic to the original pages? Do you worry that adding more pages will hurt pages that were previously published?

                        Technical SEO | | Charlessipe
                        0
                      • JU1985

                        Handling 301s: Multiple pages to a single page (consolidation)

                        Been scouring the interwebs and haven't found much information on redirecting two serparate pages to a single new page.  Here is what it boils down to: Let's say a website has two pages, both with good page authority of products that are becoming fazed out.  The products, Widget A and Widget B, are still popular search terms, but they are being combined into ONE product, Widget C.  While Widget A and Widget B STILL have plenty to do with Widget C, Widget C is now the new page, the main focus page, and the page you want everyone to see and Google to recognize. Now, do I 301 Widget A and Widget B pages to Widget C, ALTHOUGH Widgets A and B previously had nothing to do with one another?   (Remember, we want to try and keep some of that authority the two page have had.) OR do we keep Widget A and Widget B pages "alive", take them off the main navigation, and then put a "disclaimer" on the pages announcing they are now part of Widget C and link to Widget C? OR Should Widgets A and B page be canonicalized to Widget C? Again, keep in mind, widgets A and B previously were not similar, but NOW they are and result in Widget C. (If you are confused, we can provide a REAL work example of what we are talkinga about, but decided to not be specific to our industry for this.) Appreciate any and all thoughts on this.

                        Technical SEO | | JU1985
                        0

                      Get started with Moz Pro!

                      Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                      Start my free trial
                      Products
                      • Moz Pro
                      • Moz Local
                      • Moz API
                      • Moz Data
                      • STAT
                      • Product Updates
                      Moz Solutions
                      • SMB Solutions
                      • Agency Solutions
                      • Enterprise Solutions
                      Free SEO Tools
                      • Domain Authority Checker
                      • Link Explorer
                      • Keyword Explorer
                      • Competitive Research
                      • Brand Authority Checker
                      • MozBar Extension
                      • MozCast
                      Resources
                      • Blog
                      • SEO Learning Center
                      • Help Hub
                      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                      • How-to Guides
                      • Moz Academy
                      • API Docs
                      About Moz
                      • About
                      • Team
                      • Careers
                      • Contact
                      Why Moz
                      • Case Studies
                      • Testimonials
                      Get Involved
                      • Become an Affiliate
                      • MozCon
                      • Webinars
                      • Practical Marketer Series
                      • MozPod
                      Connect with us

                      Contact the Help team

                      Join our newsletter

                      Access all your tools in one place. Whether you're tracking progress or analyzing data, everything you need is at your fingertips.

                      Moz logo
                      © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                      • Accessibility
                      • Terms of Use
                      • Privacy

                      Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.